The Creative Machine Symposium 2023 is coming to the University of Oxford for the first time this year.
HISTORY
The first Creative Machine Exhibition was held in 2014, when William Latham, Frederic Fol Leymarie and Atau Tanaka conceived the idea of an art exhibition “exploring the twilight world between human and machine creativity”. Digital, robotic, AI and video art from around the globe were selected on this central premise, where a machine played some creative role “large or small” in the creative process, in partnership with the human or without the human. The exhibition stimulated huge interest and was sponsored by The Arts Council England and the first symposium was held to coincide with the exhibition.
The founding question for the Creative Machine team was Could a machine replace the human artist? and, if not, could the machine be an effective creative partner to the artist? This core theme led to the development of four more Creative Machine events over the next 9 years, bringing in hundreds of artists, curators, researchers and musicians, presenting each year’s latest technological advances in art and leading to the new Creative Machine Symposium 2023.
In 2014, The Creative Machine (Hatcham Gallery, London) was a major exhibition with a vision for showing works by key international artists, Goldsmiths staff and selected students. The range of work on show, which could be broadly termed Computer Art, included mechanical drawing devices, kinetic sculpture driven by fuzzy logic, images produced using machine learning, simulated cellular growth forms and the self-generating works using automated aesthetics, VR, 3D printing, and social telephony networks. The show was curated by Atau Tanaka, Frederic Fol Leymarie and William Latham and was sponsored by The Arts Council.
In 2018 The Creative Machine 2 Exhibition at Hatcham Gallery continued the core themes of CM1 in collaboration with CYLAND MediaArtLab based in St. Petersburg, Russia. Latham and Leymarie added curators and artists Anna Frants and Elena Gubanova to the team and showed works by artists linked to Goldsmiths and artists from CYLAND. CM2 was developed in association with the Youth Education Center at the State Hermitage and The Leonardo Journal. The works shown included many technological advances since the ‘14 show, including Virtual Reality Installations, Sculptures, Computer Art Installations, Augmented Reality Paintings and Machine Learning Video Art.
Artists work shown included: Marina Alekseeva, Memo Akten, Laura Dekker, Alexandra Dementieva, Jake Elwes, Anna Frants, Alexey Grachev / Sergey Komarov, Elena Gubanova, Ivan Govorkov, Sergey Katran, Parashkev Nachev, Vitaly Pushnitsky, Annie Tadne, Nye Thompson, William Latham, Stephen Todd, Lance Putnam, Guido Salimbeni, Peter Todd, Andy Lomas and Brigitta Zics. Previous exhibitions have featured leading as well as some emerging international artists: Naoko Tosa, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Jon McCormack, Cécile Babiole, Félix Luque Sanchez, Quayola, Andy Lomas, Patrick Tresset, Memo Akten, Daniel Berio, Vesna Petresin, Damien Borowik, Balint Bolygo, Ernest Edmonds, Paul Brown, Anna Dumitriu & Alex May, Lillevan William Latham, Daisy Latham.
